Unusually warm again: on the peculiarly temporary sensation of enjoying climate change

I wrote this on October 28, but it is still true in November, this humid unseasonable weather that clings to the days and makes our nights sweaty and confusing.

A band of clouds gathers over the outermost islands, but here, closer inland, the sky is blue and the sun warm, the air sweet and gentle, hot even, if you're in the lee of the breeze. Dragonflies fall into the sea; you notice them because they spin in the water in their death throes, their wings still revolving. The great blue herons still fish from the pond and at the backs of the coves, and the loons still gather and linger, floating silently some distance offshore.

It's still so warm that some of the lupines have burst into bloom again; likewise the thistles, and at night, here and there, we can hear a few frogs creaking and singing from the mud, as if we might skip winter and it were spring all over again. Mosquitoes still gather and slow moving flies bumble into our hair as we walk at the forest edge. Meanwhile, the apples ripen and drop from the trees, the cranberries redden and sweeten,  and the ferns have turned brown and begun to crumble.  Wild rosebushes gleam yellow and scarlet; rose hips jewel along the path by the shore. The tamaracks (or larches, as they are called in the US,) yellow and begin to drop their needles. These are all sure signs of autumn; nevertheless, no one can be sure that it has arrived.

We walk and stretch and snooze in the afternoon sun, eat carrot salad for lunch, sip green tea. Golden light halos the yellowing leaves still clinging to the trees, and porcupines mumble in the underbrush.  The dog flushes pheasants and young grouse; deer droppings pebble the yard. The grass is still green. We sit on the porch and read, stare out over the water, and puzzle over when the cold will come. A spate of warmest, record-breaking days unfolds week over week. Every denies it, but we all love it. I think Canadians like climate change, says Elisabeth, who at nearly 83 is our household elder.

And so do we, even as the dwindling numbers of returning ducks and strange and sudden appearance of exotic fish in the water and razor clams along the beach alarm us. We all catch what feel like summer colds, but enjoy walking barefoot through the house and wearing t-shirts and shorts at the end of October. Where will it all end?

We don't want it to end, but this ongoing spate of warm weather makes us nervous.  It is as if we are holding our collective breath: the world has gone unpredictable, and we do not know what will come next. 

Meanwhile, the usual rapaciousness of superextractive industries continues and everything we touch turns to waste.  Every day brings idiot pronouncements from Washington, along with increasing rollbacks of environmental protections. The poor are ever poorer, the rich richer.  Insects are dying in unprecedented numbers; new wars break out nearly every day, and the number of global refugees tops 65 million. Nothing we have thoughts immutable is going to stay the same and we here, we privileged denizens of the global north, are largely to blame: this is the truth from which we frantically turn, as we thumb through our facebook feeds, liking, liking, loving, weeping, again and again.  (Look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.)

Public Stories: On Doubt and Debt

These days we write public stories not private ones.

What is the difference?
I say, what is the difference?

A public story is not a private one.
A private story is not a public one.

A public story is when someone wishes to believe--but you withhold, withal, some doubts.
You do not share them.

In other words,
a public story is when debts make doubts unutterable.

A private story is when when doubts are spoken softly,
as if inside a closed book.

Eyes shut, like in a dream.
Perhaps you believe wishes, but will not share them.

In other words,
a private story is when doubts make debts unutterable.

Doubts, debts, what is the difference?

These days we write private stories in public
and bury the public in private, tamping down its grave.

Notes:

In searching my old journals for some ships' log notes, I came across a short dialogue written in southern Mexico in February of 2006 that began "these days we write public stories not private ones." I'm not sure to what I was referring (how quickly memory fails us!), but I can tell from other nearby entries that all the ship's company were very ill then with salmonella poisoning, and we had not in fact communicated the extent of that to our friends and relatives, so perhaps that's what I was writing about. In any case, I felt a sudden urge, once I had stumbled across these words, to seize and remotivate them, to do something with them.  It seemed as if my 2006 lament was a prefiguration of the crazy mixed-up media and political landscape of the present, in which, at once, both privacy and the commons have become radically eroded, facts a matter of opinion,  public debt irrelevant (and private debt increasingly crippling).

Public, private, what is the difference? So many of us no longer clearly know, and yet this boundary feels crucial, even sustaining, particularly in private, if not in public. Although perhaps it should be.

I reflect that a personal blog, like this one, sits sometimes oddly on the boundary between public and private; it represents a space of limited publication, but within a potentially unlimited public,  like so much of whatever we who post do post on the internet. How limited? How unlimited? How can we know? No wonder we're confused, and cannot keep our accounts straight, our debts and doubts either separated or aligned.

Why have I stopped writing so frequently here? In part because I am publishing in other venues more and they do not like to be scooped by my own blog; in part because I have been working in other media and on other projects; in part because I keep several teaching blogs when I am teaching and just cannot bear to spend too much more time on the computer. Everything seems to flow through these narrow portals, and some days I spend far too many hours sitting at a desk and staring at a screen. In fact I must ask what are you doing here now, peering into that the odd doorway/ mirror of your computer screen? Hurry, get up, push back your chair, step outside and go for a walk! Get your your private in the public, where no one can see you!

Images from a walk at Taylor Head Provincial Park, Nova Scotia, October 15, 2016.

Talking Turkey

We saw them for the first time yesterday afternoon, large dark forms bobbing uphill beneath the trees, their tails dragging through the snow.  Birds of some sort.  We got out Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern and Central North American Birds and tried to match the trailing forms to the pictures in the book: quail? grouse? They looked like turkeys, but were they big enough? We argued back and forth--they did't have red heads or obvious wattles; were they bald or not? Did they have stripes? They kept their distance from us and disappeared over the hill behind the house. Spruce grouse, we thought, but then last night I kept thinking, that body form, it looks like an African guineafowl, without the spots.

This morning they were back, clustered under the birdfeeder, chickadees fluttering over their heads. Marike called me out of my bath, and Elisabeth and I crowded at the window with our cameras.

Turkeys, for sure. Those tiny bald blue heads we'd seen on the guajolotes in Mexico, the pink legs and three-toed feet, the enormous breasts and fantails.  We checked Peterson's Field Guide again just to be sure. Yes, there they were, Mealeagris gallopavo, "bronzy iridescent body; barred wings." They seemed to be females, eleven in all.

At first the turkeys watched us carefully and ran away each time we shadowed the window with our cameras. But then they got braver and approached the house again, clustering around a near bush at the back, scratching away the snow. One or two even looked up and peered back at us, eye to curious eye.  Where had they come from? I started looking up stories on turkeys.

Turns out they sleep in the trees, although it's rare ever to see them there.  They were named by Europeans who saw them in North America and thought they resembled the guineafowl seen sometimes in Turkey (my association with African Guineafowl wasn't so daft after all, or, perhaps more precisely, no more daft than many other Eurocentric associations and geographical mistakes starting with the discovery of indians in the Carribean), domesticated in Mexico (the Mexican name, guajolote comes from the Nahuatl word, huexólotl, or "big monster"), and imported to Spain and thence to England and the rest of Europe in the 16th century. Wild turkeys, however, range throughout the Americas, and are once again roaming the forests in North America, after near extermination in the early 20th Century.

There you have it, my turkey talk. Now to go find one for Christmas supper.

Which we did, immediately after lunch--we drove to Aliments d'antan ("food the way it used to be") in Knowlton, Quebec and got a lovely 18 pound turkey, cleaned and plucked and ready for stuffing (not exactly d'antan, but that's okay).  And then on the way home, as we were slipping up the hill in 4-wheel drive in deep wet snow, we saw a wild turkey perched in the branches of fir tree. Proof positive they can fly.

On the etymology of "talking turkey"

"Talking turkey" is an expression that seems to have originated in the United States in the colonial period.  Michael Quinion, cider maker and etymologist extraordinaire explains that

"the meaning of the phrase seems to have shifted down the years. To start with it meant to speak agreeably, or to say pleasant things; nowadays it usually refers to speaking frankly, discussing hard facts, or getting down to serious business. The change seems to have happened because to “talk turkey” was augmented at some point in the nineteenth century to “talk cold turkey”, with the modern meaning. In the course of time it was abbreviated again, with the shorter form keeping the newer meaning. (The other meaning of “cold turkey” is unrelated.)

The most prosaic answer is that the “to talk pleasantly” sense came about through the nature of family conversation around the Thanksgiving dinner table. It is also suggested that it arose because the first contacts between Native Americans and settlers often centred on the supply of wild turkeys, to the extent that Indians were said to have enquired whenever they met a colonist, “you come to talk turkey?”.

Quinion then goes on to tell a version of story about the origin of the phrase that apparently first appeared in Niles Weekly Register (NY) on June 3, 1837. He doesn't find that story very convincing or satisfactory (not getting satisfaction is in part what the story is about), but for what it is worth, here it is, apparently as printed in 1837:

"Talking turkey," "as we understand it," means to talk to a man as he wants to be talked to, and the phrase is thus derived. An Indian and a white man went a shooting in partnership and a wild turkey and a crow were all the results of the day's toil. The white man, in the usual style of making a bargain with the Indian proposed a division of the spoils in this way: "Now Wampum, you may have your choice: you take the crow, and I'll take the turkey; or, if you'd rather, I'll take the turkey and you take the crow." Wampum reflected a moment on the generous alternative thus offered, and replied - "Ugh! you no talk turkey to me a bit." 

This story makes me want to propose a new definition: "talking turkey" is a rhetorical ploy and is always political; it's what the lying party (settler) says they're going to do when they're about to try to trick another (first inhabitant, citizen) into giving up the goods, as in "The World Trade Organization is all about talking turkey" or "Banks have a new policy of talking turkey with citizens when they say 'give us your money and we'll keep it safely.'" In other words, no matter what they say, "talking turkey" is all about lying.